About 90 minutes' drive dead east from San Francisco is the city of Isleton. Some 900 souls live here, according to signs posted on Highway 160 headed into town, and all of those souls live below the water line.
The road is built on top of a levee, one of many that separates Isleton and nearly every other tiny community and farm here in the Sacramento River Delta. While driving, you can turn your head to one side and see the river a few feet below the road. On the other side, peeking above the dirt, you see the second stories or rooftops of people's homes or offices. If you were to stand on the Old West-style balcony on the second floor of Rogelio's Dine and Sleep Inn in "historic downtown Isleton," and stare straight through the levee, you would be staring at water.
Rogelio's is where we're sleeping tonight, on this weekend jaunt into the closest analogue Northern California has to Louisiana bayou country. In the humid air of the Delta, everybody has a boat, or access to one; in the still afternoon of the Delta, there isn't much else going on.
Isleton achieved national fame in the late 1990s when its chief of police handed out concealed weapons permits to anybody who wanted one. A city council member who protested the chief's subsequent firing pointed out that the handgun permits brought in badly needed revenue. Cash has been in short supply since then.
No fewer than two-thirds of the 19th-century wooden buildings that line Isleton's downtown are vacant. The bank is closed, as is the police department. A short drive from my perch above Rogelio's — a combination bar, Chinese/Mexican restaurant, hotel, and casino — are a few new vinyl-sided homes. They are empty — testament to the subprime meltdown, when the town gambled on the housing boom to remake its fortune.
Isleton had charm in its day, the kind of charm in which the humor in the sign advertising a bait shop — the proprietor is the "master baiter," the sign says — had currency. Today, this is the kind of town where an adult on a bicycle, such as the grandmother in a house dress cycling in front of the lone convenience store, speaking in purebred Okie ("Take a rye-ite, then a lay-eft") is a menacing sight.
Elsewhere around us, beyond the property lines of homes and businesses, is the Delta's real raison d'etre: endless green fields of grapes, pears (or "pay-ers," as a planter would call them), grass for hay, and other crops. Water appears to be no issue here.
The Delta is "50 miles away, and 50 years in the past," Johnny tells me a couple hours later, in a voice that sounds like polished gravel. He's serving cold beers to a farmer, a tattooed, leather-vested biker, me, and a few others at Al the Wop's, the only bar in Locke, about 20 minutes upriver from Isleton.
Johnny is 49 and has held court behind the stick at Al's off and on for 30 years, he claims, serving the mix of the descendants of the Chinese farmers, the white planters who ran them off, and the Mexicans who work the farms now. He serves each equally. "One of the cartel clans came in once, and I told him, 'You can play no more than three Mexican songs on the jukebox,'" he says, showing what passes for progressive politics. "I'm not racist. I don't give a fuck."
Locke is on the east side of the river, across the water from Walnut Grove, where John Garamendi, the former deputy secretary of the interior, former lieutenant governor, and current U.S. congressman has his ranch. A century ago, when Chinese immigrant labor fueled the Delta's agricultural economic engine, the Chinatown here, second only to San Francisco's, burned. Some of the survivors moved upriver, to the opposite side, and settled in Locke, which today is one of the last rural Chinese communities left in the United States.
The heritage of all that is everywhere out here. It's in the Chinese restaurant across the street from Al's, where the smell of the wok wafts in from the rear kitchen, and in the restored Chinese temple and one-room schoolhouse along the town's one main road. It's in the blood of the farmer drinking next to me, a "fifth or sixth generation" pear planter, he's not sure which, whose father, at 88, still works six days a week in the fields.
Because this is what you do in the Delta: You get a job, and you hang onto it, any way you can. "Yep. I'm gonna die behind a bar," Johnny says, well after midnight, when the only people left in the bar are his wife, myself, and my partner (to whom he'd served a double bourbon to while I was outside sharing a joint with the pear planter). "Just not this one."
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